A long-overdue army is finally gathering. Let’s pray it’s not too late.
Its membership marches under the banner that “courts don’t make law,” but some of the highest ranks of this righteous army nonetheless understands a fundamental problem with its creed. As with so many other American ideals, their profound natures have been rendered from obvious to oblivious in a sickly proportion of the public mind.
The selfish inattention and arrogance of successive generations of pseudo Americans has, for example, allowed for notions of “innocent until proven guilty” to be perverted. To such an extent that Kim Davis could be thrown in jail without trial, based solely on the whim of a single judge fueled by the rage of the Rainbow Jihad’s mob.
She was just the latest example of a growing list of Christians (bakers, florists, servicemen, etc.) targeted by their own government because they refuse to cast aside the laws of nature and nature’s God for a lie. But if their sacrifices are to be worth it, that which they fought for must once again be stamped on the American conscience to no less an extent than when our nation’s founders put their lives, fortunes and sacred honor on the line in its defense.
To paraphrase the scriptures, we must “help our unbelief” if our fight is to bear lasting fruit for not only ourselves but successive generations. And it is in that spirit that 64 prominent American legal scholars have stepped forward.
Last week’s statement issued by Princeton law professor Robert George’s American Principles Project contained the following call to arms concerning last summer’s off-the-rails Obergefell v. Hodges ruling by the United States Supreme Court:
“To treat as ‘settled’ and ‘the law of the land’ the decision of five Supreme Court justices who, by their own admission, can find no warrant for their ruling in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution, would indeed be to resign our government into the hands of (the court). That is something that no citizen or statesman who wishes to sustain the great experiment in ordered liberty bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers should be willing to do.”
To declare such a thing is to gladly take up the cause of the Declaration of Independence once again. After all, its author, Thomas Jefferson, singled out King George III’s abuse of the judiciary more often than any of his other “long train of abuses.” Jefferson also spent much of his post-presidency years warning us about accepting the canard of judicial supremacy in our rule of law, and that if we do we are sowing the seeds for replacing our constitutional republic with a judicial oligarchy.
In other words, based on the lawlessness we’ve suffered since the Warren Court became the first of our unelected progressive revisionists, history has once more proven Jefferson prophetic.
Yet decade-after-decade the Republican Party and even much of the conservative movement made no real attempt to reign in these cultural Marxists in black robes. Not when they rewrote the establishment clause. Not when they decreed child-sacrifice. Not when they allocated tax dollars be given to illegal aliens. Not when they rewrote the eminent domain laws to deal a serious blow to private property rights. And so on, and so on, and so on. Instead, much of the good guys on our side just washed their hands of the matter, and fell in line with the new “law of the land” no matter how much of an affront it was to the real law — let alone basic human decency.
Now, with the courts claiming the authority to defy the most basic presuppositions of a civilized society like gender, family and freedom of conscience, it seems as if our movement has finally had enough of the judicial coup de tat. Finally, we seem willing to acknowledge that nowhere in the U.S. Constitution is Article III given a magical trump card over Articles I and II. And that is especially true when things as sacred as faith, family and freedom are at stake.
The American Principles Project is hoping to galvanize our movement to finally say in one voice what the Constitution says plainly: Obergefell is not the law of the land because courts do not make law. Therefore, it should be belittled and it should be disavowed at every turn. You know, just like the progressives do every single day with the actual Constitution.
The campaign’s Action Statement states that Obergefell “has no more claim to that status than Dred Scott v. Sandford had when President Abraham Lincoln condemned that pro-slavery decision,” and defends Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent that the court has become a progressive stooge used to “vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.”
When Dred Scott is your doppelganger, you are doing it wrong. That’s why the American Principles Project’s action statement is a lucid and necessary response to the thieves in our midst:
“Like Lincoln, we will not accept judicial edicts that undermine the sovereignty of the people, the Rule of Law, and the supremacy of the Constitution. We will resist them by every peaceful and honorable means. We will not be bullied into acquiescence or silence.”
Amen. Now let’s get to work. We’ve got a lot of surrendered ground to reclaim.
(Steve Deace is a nationally syndicated talk show host and also the author of the new book “Rules for Patriots: How Conservatives Can Win Again.” You can “like” him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter @SteveDeaceShow.)
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